


Crumbling Like Jericho

by orphan_account



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bottom Bucky, Bucky Barnes Feels, Deaf Clint Barton, Discussions of Human Experimentation, M/M, PTSD, Will Tag More As Needed, not AOU compliant, not civil war compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2016-08-07
Packaged: 2018-07-25 22:03:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7548925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two years after the Winter Soldier broke his programming, Steve finds him in the carnage of a destroyed HYDRA base intent on rescuing a pair of siblings slated to become HYDRA's newest lab rats, Wanda and Pietro Maximoff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They are in the middle of the Sokovian wilderness and somewhere in the back of his brain, Steve smells the age-old tang of gun-smoke and copper, the loamy flavor of churned up earth. For a moment – just a moment – he hears the cry of the mortar shells, the screaming as they arc across the sky. _Get down!_ _Take cover!_

It is only Sam, the wind whistling over the alloyed contours of the FALCON wings. He drops from the sky with a _whoosh_ , the snow crunching beneath his boots. “I did a fly-by of the bunkers to the north- and south-east. It’s pretty much the same state of affairs all the way around the perimeter.” His brown eyes, behind the flight goggles, betray nothing.

Steve says “goddamnit.”

The whole scene is something like a child’s finger-painting; the snow spattered with blackened blood and brain matter, scorch marks scored into the cement. And this is only the first outpost – what will they find when they reach the main lab?

“Couldn’t have happened more than eight hours ago,” Natasha’s voice from the Quinjet is tinny and hollow in their earwigs.

“Uh,” says Sam. “You can tell this _how_ , exactly?”

Steve waves a hand in the direction of the fallen HYDRA agents, their tac gear sticky and riddled with bullet holes. _James Buchanan Barnes, what on earth have you done now?_ He tries not to think about the corpses, the innumerable dead left scattered across occupied Europe. Good men, bad men – their blood looked the same staining the snow, the dirt, the sand. “Rigor mortis will set in about six hours after death, but the cold delays it some. Bodies are just starting to stiffen.” He swallows down the rush of over-sweet saliva on his tongue. “Rough estimate; eight hours.”

“You are some freaky people,” Sam says like he hasn’t spent the last two years rubbing elbows with the Avengers.

The sound in their earwigs may just be static, but he thinks it sounds suspiciously like Barton snorting. “We’re scanning the compound now,” the archer says. “I’ve got three life signs registering in the north-east quadrant.”

They have been here so many times before, standing amidst the ruined data consoles, the cryo tubes shattered and leaking antiseptic goop onto the cement, the bodies scattered on the doorstep. “ _Our boy was definitely here, Cap. But he’s long gone by now_.” Oh, Steve hates the traitorous little thrill in his chest, the silent prayer that wells within him. _Please, please. Don’t let us be too late again. Bring him home to me._

They are all looking to him to make the call, waiting for his decision. He says “let’s go check it out.” And the Quinjet’s engines whine not too far off. “Sam – give me a lift?”

“What do I look like?” Sam grins, spreading his arms, and the wings unfold with a hydraulic hum. “Uber?”

Steve says nothing, just steps in close and holds on tight as Sam launches them into the air. It never gets less thrilling – the lurch of his stomach, the rush of air and breathless acceleration.  He had whooped and laughed and hollered the first time they’d flown together – a joyride through the cloudless blue sky, arcing over DC. It feels like a miracle.

When they touch down in the clearing outside the compound, Natasha and Clint are already on the ground and armed to the teeth. Natasha checks the sights of her gun, reloads the clip, and says “I don’t like this, Cap. Something’s off.”

The same uneasy, crawling sensation Natasha feels has settled between Steve’s shoulder blades. An itch he can’t scratch – it just doesn’t make sense. “You think it could be an ambush? Something that wouldn’t be picked up by the scanners?”

Natasha shrugs.

“Impossible,” Clint says, slinging the quiver over his shoulder. “Those scanners are designed to pick up human life signs, but they’ll also ping any drone, android, or otherwise sentient tech – if the readings say ‘empty building’ then you’ve got yourself an empty building, my friend. Now,” he spreads his hands, rolls his shoulders with a crinkle-eyed, cocky grin. “Who wants to go check it out?”

Steve takes point and they crunch through the snow single-file. There are telltale scorch marks around the gaping doorway, the smell of ozone on the air. The crumpled doors clatter under their boots.

When they turn down the first corridor, it takes everything in Steve not to gag. Sam does gag, turning his face into his shoulder. It’s the smell that gets them first; sweet copper blood, the bitter tang of antiseptic, the cold sterile smell of medical equipment and dissection tables. It’s the smell of cryo-freeze, of raided basement labs, the IV poles bent and broken, the exam tables overturned. _Oh, Jesus_.

“All right,” Steve says. “Nat, see if you can get into their servers, find out exactly what HYDRA was doing here. Take Clint to watch your six. Sam and I’ll check out those life signs you registered on the Quinjet.” _Three signatures. What were they walking into here?_

The corner of her full mouth twitches. “Yes, Ma.” She steps closer and sometimes Steve forgets just how tiny she is, how the infamous Black Widow becomes dwarfed when she stands beside him. “Looks like the life-signs are registering on the floor below us.” He reads the data screen over her shoulder, a tiny console built into her gauntlet. There are four bright-blue blips labeled _Rom, Bart, Rog,_ and _Wil_. She shifts the screen and three more red dots appear, pulsing _Unknown_. “Could be HYDRA personnel. Could be prisoners. Could be a trap.”

Steve raises an eyebrow – the effect is mostly lost behind his helmet. “What’s your point?”

“Don’t get your hopes up.” It kills her to say it, to remain the cynic, the pragmatist. But this isn’t a fairy tale. Someone needs to remind Steve that there isn’t always a perfect, happy ending. “You don’t know that it’s him.”

“I know,” Steve agrees. “But I don’t know that it isn’t.”

And that is just Steven Grant Rogers in a nutshell, all stubborn conviction and fighting spirit. For the most part, Natasha thinks it’s endearing, marvels at the unwavering strength of his belief – but sometimes… Sometimes she wants to shake him, to take his big blond head in her hands and look him in the eye while she screams that the world is not so clean, that it is bloody and dirty and sinful and he has no right to keep believing in goodness because it’s nothing more than an empty pipe dream.

But instead she bites her tongue. Sam gives her a knowing look – the one that says _I Know, He’s a Moron and His Head’s Thicker Than Cement, But This Is Why We Love Him_. She arches an eyebrow and says “don’t let him do anything stupid” then spins on her heel and heads for the nearest bank of computers that hasn’t been reduced to total slag.

Clint gives a jaunty little salute and trails after her.

“You hear that?” Steve turns back to Sam, who fixes him with raised eyebrows and a stern look. “My ass is on the line with the Black Widow, please keep yourself in check.”

Steve is already heading for the stairwell, shield raised and expression grim. “I make no promises,” he tosses back over his shoulder.

He will not think about Austria, about prowling through darkened corridors whispering prayers – _let me not be too late. Let us make it out of here alive_. He will not think about the other HYDRA bases and the Winter Soldier program files. But he cannot get the labs out of his head when they step over bodies in white coats and surgical scrubs. _They are HYDRA. They are HYDRA and they deserved this._

But, God, he wants to be sick.

The stairwell is huge and hollow, all wet concrete and rusty mildewed smell. Sam’s got the building schematics pulled up, keeps one eye on the slow-blinking vital signs and the other on Steve whose shoulders are hunched up around his ears, whose breath snarls in and out of his lungs too quick and too shallow.

“Five hundred feet,” Sam murmurs when they reach the landing. The door gapes on its hinges, inviting. _Come and see._

Steve’s shoulders hunch, bracing for impact. He gives the door a push.

The earwigs spit static. “Cap?”

“Not now, Natasha.” The rushing water goes _plink plink plink_ through the pipes overhead, the sound thrown back off cement.

The walls are lined with cells. Doors recessed into the wall, built several inches thick and reinforced with steel and vibranium alloy, only a four-inch grate cut at eye level. Steve lingers outside each one, just a half-second. A breath. What will they find if they open these doors? What has HYDRA kept locked away down here?

“I’m downloading the files from their database, Cap,” Natasha presses. There’s something in her tone, terse and knife-edged. Steve’s stomach flips.

“Four hundred feet,” Sam checks the readout, releases the safety from his pistol. “Go right up ahead.” The blips are getting closer, little red warning signs.

Steve’s skin has gone clammy, his heart seizing, jack-hammering in his chest. He is having an arrhythmia, he’s sure of it. This is too much, too much – it’s going to explode, the weak little organ will burst like overripe fruit. He can’t… He can’t…

They turn the corner.

“Two hundred feet.”

“ _Steve_ , you need to hear this…”

“One Hundred.”

“It’s got to be why he’s here.”

“Fifty feet,” Sam says. “Go left.”

He turns the corner. Natasha’s voice in his ear is grave, says the words “illegal human experimentation.” Sam thumbs back the hammer of the gun. The figure on the floor, all in black and half in shadow, kneels still as stone with his hands behind his head.

Steve drops the shield.

“ _Bucky_.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somewhere in an interview I can't be bothered to find the writers said that the Sokovian language and accent was based on Serbian - so the Maixmoffs and Bucky speak a Google Translated version of Serbian and Yiddish. Because the twins are canonically Jewish and I hate that they ignored that in MCU, and I headcanon Bucky as Jewish too.
> 
> Fell free to correct me if any of the translations are super screwy. I only speak English and Pig Latin.

They have searched and searched and scoured the earth and he has hoped beyond all hope. But now. Now – it’s _real_. It’s real and Bucky is here and Steve has prayed day in and day out for this moment, and now it’s happening… and… he can’t even believe it…

He says again, small. Plaintive. “Buck?”

Kneeling before them Bucky seems… diminished, somehow. Hands up, subjugated, all the monster gone from him, the wildness leeched from his bones. His eyes are screwed shut, the skin pinched tight around the corners of his mouth. “It’s okay,” he whispers, a small steady mantra. “It’s okay.” The words tremble on his lips.

He looks ready to face his execution. Steve’s insides clench.

“Clint, ‘Tasha,” Sam puts a finger to his earwig “could really use a hand down here. _We’ve found him_.”

“ _Barnes?! Barnes, šta se dešava?_ ” A voice, small and feminine, from inside the nearest cell, lips pressed to the grate. Sokovian. _What’s happening?_ There’s the bang of a fist against the reinforced steel and they all flinch.

"Easy,” Steve says, holds out his hands placating. “Easy.”

Bucky tips his head back, says over his shoulder “ _Sve je u redu, dušo_.” It’s all right, sweetheart. “ _Sve je u redu_.”

He looks back at Sam, at Steve who cannot hear a word over the blood thrumming in his ears. The thin skin under his eyes is blue and bruised, translucent. “They’re just kids,” he whispers. “HYDRA was using ‘em for experiments, but they’re just kids.” His voice is so rough, so full of pain – but it’s clear, there are none of the garbled, strangling noises he’d made on the helicarrier. This is Bucky Barnes in control again.

Sam, who remembers falling from the sky – the shredded metal wings – does not lower his weapon. Says “ _Steve_ ” in a low, warning tone.

And Bucky looks Steve in the eye and whispers “I’m not crazy. I’m not… I broke the programming. I remember. Your mom’s name was Sarah.” Then softer, fond. “You used to wear newspapers in your shoes. I used to climb up the fire escape outside your building to knock on the window. You used to have a chip in your left incisor where you cracked it on Frank Dooley’s knuckles…” He looks like he could keep going, his eyes wide and grey and desperate to prove that he is okay, that he is salvageable, that he _remembers_.

Because he does. He remembers everything.

Steve’s swallows down a sob. “Bucky,” he says “get off the damn floor.”

He does, wide-eyed and terrified. “You can do whatever you want with me,” Bucky whispers, swallows hard against the tremor in his voice. “Just don’t hurt the kids.”

Sam sighs, holstering his Stark-issued pistol. “Nobody’s hurting anyone,” he says. “ _Right_?” The blood of the HYDRA agents is still soaking into his frontal lobe, though, and he does not take his eyes off Barnes, even when he hears the twang of a taut bowstring and Natasha says “hey fellas,” in that wicked, sultry voice of hers.

Clint says “what’s with the Mexican Standoff? Should I be shooting somebody?”

“Please don’t.” Steve’s voice is hoarse. “Buck, you mind explaining yourself?”

He has not removed his hands from their position behind his head, surrendering. Bucky says, low and anxious, “I didn’t want to do this anymore. To fight. But they’re just kids, and I found the files and... I couldn’t let HYDRA do to them what… what they did to me.”

“Okay,” Steve whispers. “Okay. We’ll get the kids out of here and we’ll get you out of here, Buck, and it’s gonna be just fine.” He squeezes Bucky’s shoulder, quick and firm. “Nat, think you can hack the door panels?”

“I’ll do you one better, Cap.” Before they can blink, Clint has two arrows nocked and flying from the bowstring and the control panels spit blue sparks. The doors groan open. He sing-songs “ _ta-da!_ ”

Bucky makes a beeline into the first cell and it’s like he hits an invisible wall. One moment he’s standing in the doorway and the next he’s crashing backward onto his ass.

Clint barks “what the fuck?” and Bucky, utterly nonplussed, picks himself up off the concrete floor, shaking the hair from his eyes.

“Goddamnit Pietro,” he mutters, dusting himself off. “Watch where you’re going, would you? Nearly turned me into roadkill.” And then Bucky raises a hand, pointing into the cell where a pair of bodies in shapeless grey jumpsuits embrace. “Pietro and Wanda Maximoff. HYDRA _enhanced_ them, the fuckers. He has a hyper-fast metabolism, she uses mental telepathy. Basically, he's fast and she's weird.”

Steve points to each of the Avengers in turn. “This is Sam, Natasha, and Clint.”

Bucky has the presence of mind to cringe. He remembers red hair and electrical shocks, the rush of wind against his face and an angel knocked out of the sky.

Pietro, stocky and unusually silver-haired, stares at them over his sister’s dark head. “ _Barnes_ ,” he spits “ _ko su oni_?” It’s accompanied by a particularly venomous look.

“ _Osvetnici_ ,” Bucky replies. Avengers. “ _Oni su dobri ljudi, a neće povrediti_.” They’re good people, no one here is going to hurt you. His scruffy face is raw, all naked compassion and reassurance. And an after-image of fear. “It’s okay.”

Steve swings the shield around, clips it to the harness at his back. “We’re here to help,” he soothes “if you’ll let us. We’ll take you somewhere safe, where HYDRA can’t get their hands on you. We can help you learn to manage your powers.”

The little Maximoff girl, dark-haired and smudge-eyed, turns and says in thickly accented English “I think it would not be so bad… to have the help of others. Pietro?”

He frowns, lips pursed. “I am not so sure, _meyn shvester_. _Vos aoyb zey nor viln tsu nutsn aundz? Vos aoyb zey shatn ir? Mir hobn keyn sibh tsu getroyen zey_.” What if they just want to use us? What if they hurt you? Pietro’s voice cracks with emotion. We have no reason to trust them…

Steve’s eyebrows climb toward his hairline, registering the switch from Sokovian to rapid-fire Yiddish. He never spoke it well, only picked up a handful of words and phrases, but it brings back sudden vivid-sharp memories of Bucky whispering with Rebecca, kissing his mother on the cheek on his way out of the apartment.

And then Bucky turns to them with that old, mischievous sparkle in his eyes and says “ _Ikh tsuzog zey vet nit shatn ir. Ikh volt nit lozn zey_ ” and Steve’s heart trips, stutters through a handful of off-kilter beats.

Apparently the promise is enough to placate Pietro. His big shoulders slump, a defensive arm wrapped around his sister, and he says “okay… Okay.”

Bucky smiles then. It’s a tired, malnourished thing – a ghost of that old movie star grin – but Steve thinks it must be the most wonderful thing he’s ever seen. He claps Pietro on the shoulder. “Let’s get you two out of this hellhole.” A glance at the ceiling, dripping mildewed water, the newly installed steel doors several inches thick. He shudders. “I’m getting the heebie-jeebies being down here.”

The sun off the snow seems a million watts brighter now, the air crisp and clean. Wanda stares at the bare bones of the trees, the cloudless blue sky, and red sparks dance around her fingertips when she reaches out to feel the wind against her palms. “I never thought I would see the sunlight again,” she chokes on the words, half laughter, half sob.

Something in Clint’s face softens a little bit, leaves hairline fractures in the corners of his eyes. “It’s all right,” he says and his voice is gentle in a way that Steve’s never heard before. “You’re free now.”

Pietro throws his head back and whoops, feral and elated, and then blurs. Too quick for the eye to follow, he leaves a trail of churned up snow and footprints in his wake, racing circles through the clearing around the base. They hear him cackling as he passes.

Sam coughs, gives Steve a _look_ and oh. _Oh_.

Bucky is there, silhouetted in the sunlight, and he is real and whole and Steve’s breath catches in his throat. The grey eyes watching him are round and anxious, Bucky’s mouth quirked in the tiniest facsimile of a smile brimming with hope and terror. He looks ready to bolt, but something silent in his eyes begs Steve to ask him to stay.

Because Steve is an idiot, he grins like his face might split and says “hey.”

“Hey,” Bucky’s voice is small, shy. He starts to say “Steve, I’m sorry…” But the rest of his sentence disappears into Steve’s big, blue-spangled shoulder. There is a hand cradling the back of his head, fingers curling in his hair, and Bucky freezes. Damn. He wants to stay here forever, wants to run, wants to break down and sob, wants… wants…

He doesn’t know what he wants. He squeezes Steve around the middle with his flesh arm, keeps his metal hand limp at his side. “You shouldn’t trust me,” Bucky whispers. “I… I broke the programming, but everything I did… I hurt…”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll deal with it,” Steve’s voice is firm, decisive. “Now, I’m taking you home.”

Home. God, that’s a magical word.

He follows Steve to the Quinjet, straps himself in beside Wanda and Pietro who sit with their fingers intertwined and their jaws set. So young, so brave. Bucky remembers a time when he was like that, full of life and ideals and fire, before HYDRA cracked him open and scooped out everything good and whole. He can never be that man again.

But wants to try. For Steve’s sake, he'll try.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A really short filler chapter: the flight from Sokovia to Stark Tower.

Natasha and Clint disappear into the cockpit, rev the engines and punch a series coordinates into the autopilot function. Their faces are grim and their hands form and reform symbols in the air faster than Steve – whose grasp of ASL is rudimentary at best – can possibly manage to comprehend.

They are airborne and Sam busies himself with the medical kit, wrapping Pietro’s scraped knuckles, frowning at the half-healed burn marks along Wanda’s arms. His long fingers are gentle, his voice subdued. He is careful to look them in the eye, to explain everything he does when he blots antiseptic on the wounds and wraps them in bandages.

“There we go,” he says, tucking strands of Wanda’s long hair behind her ear, smoothing the little butterfly bandages over the scab at her temple. “That’ll heal up just fine. Won’t even leave a scar.” He smiles, all white teeth and warm dark eyes, and the little Sokovian waif can’t help but grin back because Sam is just that charming.

Steve watches it all out of the corner of his eye – Sam packing up the medical kit, Wanda resting her head on her brother’s shoulder – but keeps the majority of his attention angled toward Bucky. He sits folded in on himself, shoulders hunched, elbows and knees drawn in as though he can take up as little space as possible, make himself unobtrusive. He still looks like he wants to flee, like he might jump right out the airlock the second Steve looks away. So Steve reaches across the aisle, lays his hand over the still metal wrist, and wills him _stay_.

Behind the tangled curtain of hair – it doesn’t look like he’s cut it since DC – Bucky chews his bottom lip. It’s an old habit, one that Steve remembers from their childhood, from Brooklyn, from the war when Bucky stretched out flat with his rifle in the snow. The sight of it is a stab of tenderness between his ribs. An old, affectionate ache. Somewhere in the backmost corner of his brain, he thinks about kissing those chapped, swollen lips and how lovely it would feel. And then he shoves the thought aside – it’s the last thing either one of them needs right now – and says “Bucky, can you even _see_ right now?”

Four pairs of eyes stare at him.

He can feel Sam smirking, digs around in the hidden pocket of his uniform pants. Bucky blinks, all huge grey eyes behind the curtain of hair, and Steve comes up victorious with one of the sturdy elastic hair-ties he keeps on hand for Natasha. “Your hair,” he clarifies, and he can feel the traitorous flush creeping up his neck.

Bucky, staring like Steve’s grown a second head, reaches up and cards through the long tangles like he’s only just realized they’re there. “Oh.” He ducks his head, sinks his teeth back into his bottom lip.

“C’mere,” Steve can’t help his stupid grin. He knows Sam will be all over him for it later, can’t really bring himself to care. “Let me tie it back for you.”

It’s surprising, really, how easily Bucky acquiesces. He puts his back against Steve’s shins, sinks heavy to the floor in between the flight seats. “I hardly even notice it anymore,” he admits, tipping his head back to try and meet Steve’s gaze. “Can’t bring myself to cut it – be like seeing a ghost every time I looked in the mirror.”

Steve works his fingers through the soft, dark hair with long strokes. It’s easy, familiar. He knows the shape of this skull and all its contours – could read it like a phrenologist. His fingers find new scars along the scalp, precise surgical lines, a new dent behind the right ear, and his breath shudders in his throat. _What have they done to you_? He swallows it down. “Don’t know how you manage to even see the mirror through all that hair,” Steve teases, expertly twisting the elastic around his thick handful of Bucky’s hair. It’s nothing fancy, just one of the loose messy knots he’s seen Natasha gather her hair into when she wants the weight of it off her neck, but Bucky looks like a whole different person.

He almost looks like… _No_. Steve shakes himself. No, this is not the Bucky Barnes he knew in the forties. He is not the Steve Rogers he knew in the forties – it’s unfair to pretend otherwise.

Natasha bought him a book for Christmas, a glossy-paged series of photographs by someone named Eugene Atget. They were photos of Paris at the turn of the century, long-exposure plates and haunting sepia views of streets and shopfronts. He thinks of those photos often, of the decay and rebirth there, the ghosts of Parisians passing by too quickly to make an impression upon the negatives that required hours to set. He thinks this man, this Atget who preserved the old world in the face of the new, would understand his very soul.

He and Bucky are men out of time. They are not today or tomorrow or yesterday anymore. They are lucky to just be.

Steve gives Bucky’s shoulder a pat, grins down into his wide-eyed, wondering face. “Would you look at that,” he says “found a familiar face under all that hair after all.”

Wanda says into her brother’s ear “ _Ikh hofn emetser lib mir vi az samdey_ ” and Bucky makes a shocked, choked-off little noise. I hope someone loves me like that someday.

“ _Vos ton ir meynen_ libe?” He manages in a strangled voice. What do you mean _love_? Oh Jesus, he’d thought… He’d been so careful… Steve couldn’t know…

Wanda cringes. “ _Ikh nor angenumen_ …” I’d only assumed. “ _Ir akt vi libhabers_.”

Bucky shakes his head once, hard, and prays that Steve does not understand the Sokovian-tinted Yiddish.

Pietro, with a knowing look, says in his heavy-accent “well, I think it looks silly. His hair is like… what is the word with the mainstream and the indie? _Hipster_. He looks like hipster.”

Steve’s laugh is a bright, startled thing and Bucky is so relieved he could kiss the speedster. Sam, collapsing into the nearest flight seat, screws up his face and makes noises like he can’t breathe, gasping “oh my _God_.” Even Bucky manages to grin, feeling the vibrations of Steve’s laughter against his spine.

For just a moment, it seems like everything will be all right.

Of course, Bucky should know by now, those moments never really last.


	4. Chapter 4

They’re still an hour away from Avengers Tower when Natasha gives Clint’s shoulder a squeeze and ducks back into the main cabin. It’s the strangest thing, she thinks, to see the Winter Soldier with his eyes warm and human, unmasked, seated shoulder-to-shoulder with Steve. It raises her hackles, makes the bullet scar above her iliac crest throb.

She sits across from him. He flinches like he’s been slapped.

“Here’s the deal,” Natasha says. “Steve trusts whoever it is you used to be. And Sam,” she jerks her chin, short curls swinging against her jaw. “Sam trusts Steve. However, Steve’s judgment in this matter is skewed and I don't want to see him hurt – so I’ll ask all the hard questions that no one else wants to.” The flint-strike in her hazel eyes says _and I’ll_ do _what no one else is willing to, if it comes down to it_.

“Tasha…”

“Now, Nat – c’mon…”

Bucky clears his throat, ducking her steady unrelenting gaze. “That’s smart,” he mumbles to his boots. “That’s… you shouldn’t trust me. After everything I did…”

“It wasn’t you,” Steve’s voice is soft, his hand on Bucky’s flesh-and-blood wrist feather light.

“It _was_ me.” The fingers clench, tendons raised and tight beneath the skin. “Maybe I wasn’t in my right mind, but it was still my finger on the trigger.”

Natasha knows what that’s like. Remembers the years of careful, endless conditioning in the Red Room. The orders, the punishments. She has been a pawn. “Barnes.”

He is drifting hollow-eyed, fading back into a past drenched in blood and gunpowder. Steve’s grip on his wrist will leave a bruise.

“What happened after the helicarrier?” She leans forward, her small, deadly hands dangling loose between her knees. Pulls him back. “After DC?”

"I ran." His voice is low, scratched-record rough. "I couldn't... there was too much in my head. It was like a flipped switch – one minute nothing, and then..." He swallows hard, stares at his bent knees like they might hold the secrets of the universe. " _Everything_. I remembered and the world had all this _meaning_ – not just missions and targets and collateral. It hurt. And there were too many faces, too many people, and I was a goddamn pipe bomb and I didn't want to take anyone else with me when the counter hit zero."

"Where did you go?" She does not look at Steve whose lips tremble, at Sam with his dark eyes full of endless compassion, at the strange and deadly twins with their sad, young faces.

Bucky chews his lip, considering. "It's hard to remember," he admits. "Everything was coming back to me and I was in an abandoned warehouse near the port, and I was back on the train, and... I was nowhere and everywhere. I raided a HYDRA cache for clothes, passport, cash. Left the weapons. Snuck onto a tanker headed for Turkey – it was easier to process, when I was somewhere they didn't speak English. Every other word was a trigger, a memory."

"You started going after HYDRA three months later."

He nods. "I made it to Sokovia of all places, for the first time. Hid in a safe house there for awhile. Sweated out the programming."

"That's where we found him," Pietro breaks in. The smirk at the corners of his lips seems hollow. "We were protesting, a big march in the market square. The police... they opened fire on the protesters. Barnes – it was like an avenging angel – he was just _there_ , and he held up his hand and stopped the bullets."

Wanda says in a low, tiny voice "he looked so scared. Like he couldn't believe what he was doing – but he saved our lives."

Bucky's shoulders jerk. "I... I was buying groceries, of all the damn things, and then my brain was all of a sudden in Sarajevo, nineteen-ninety-three. The siege, snipers firing at people in the streets like shooting fish in a barrel. I just reacted."

"You were brave," Steve soothes.

"I was crazy." He says it with a bitter sort of finality. Then, shaking himself, "I knew HYDRA's fingerprints were all over the uprising – a finger in every fuckin' pie. I raided one of the smaller bases in the north for weapons, information. I found..." A breath. "I found my files, the cryo tubes. I killed every last soul in that outpost and I burned it to the ground."

"Where did you go after that?" She will not be affected by his narrative, will not fall back into her own past, her own dark and bloody memories. There's an ache behind her floating ribs, but she's not injured. Cannot lie and tell herself it's just a pulled muscle. A bruise.

"Romania. Latveria. The Czech Republic. I wiped out the HYDRA cells there, ones I remembered, new ones I uncovered." He's bitten through the thin, feathering skin of his bottom lip, tongues away the blood that wells up, red and fresh. "I came back to Sokovia in between, tried to keep an eye on the kids. And then – I tracked down a HYDRA cell in France, it took me six months to wipe them all out – and when I came back," he is careful not to say home, avoids thinking about the ratty little flat on the third floor of the tenement house with Wanda's colorful curtains and the noisy radiator "they were gone."

"Barnes was not the only one keeping eyes on us," Pietro supplies. "When he went, HYDRA came for us. I knew how to shoot, killed two of them. But we were no real resistance. They brought us to the outpost and... well." He spreads his hands.

"They made us monsters." Wanda curls her fingers in her lap. A few damp tear stains seep into the fabric of her trousers.

It's Sam who speaks. Sam who has been so quiet, so solemn – his voice is hard with an unshakable certainty. "I don't see any monsters here. Do you, Steve?"

With eyes gleaming, Steve whispers "not a one."

Natasha thinks they must be fools. She would pull the caul from their eyes, show them the starkness of the real world, the sins written in the lines of their palms and the blackness of their hearts. The monstrous, malformed things in the cages of their ribs, secreted between their vertebrae. Like Dorian Gray, with his damned and damaged soul, a painting hidden in the attic. Maybe there is hope for the twins, they are still young, still salvageable. But there is no such salvation for herself, and she can see in his soft grey eyes, Barnes is just as damned as she is.

She says, cold "look a little closer, Steve. You'll see them."

He's got that look on his face. The one that says he will pull them from the abyss himself through sheer force of will. Come hell or high water he will love them enough to save them. Some days, she thinks she would like to believe it.

"I see victims," he says. "Not monsters."

Barnes has gone very still, totally silent. He sits like a statue, bent in half with his elbows on his knees. He doesn't even appear to breathe.

"Did you know we would find you? At the base today?" She will keep pressing, will twist the knife deeper and deeper until the blood flows clean. She cannot stop herself. "You're a wanted man in a dozen different countries – did you think you could keep running? How can we know that you broke the programming?"

Sam's hand is heavy on her shoulder. "He's dissociating," he murmurs. "Just let him be." He sits on the edge of the flight seat, with his shoulder pressed up against hers in a familiar, affectionate gesture. "Now, I'm gonna address the elephant in the plane – what the hell are we going to tell Tony? Or the government for that matter? We're flying into New York with an internationally wanted fugitive and a pair of illegal aliens. Do we have a plan?"

Steve's hunched shoulders and downcast eyes say it all.

"We have no plan," Sam echoes. Natasha has to marvel at how he manages to sound both incredulous and completely resigned at the same time. "Steve, you are _killing_ me. The Star Spangled Man With a Plan, my ass."

That's enough to bring Bucky back from whatever hollow, silent place he's retreated to. One eyebrow lifts, a sardonic twist to his full mouth. "You know," he says. "I love it when other people realize what I had to deal with for the better part of twenty years. The greatest tactical strategist of the age is just a punk on the right side of our Lady Luck."

Even Natasha is rendered helpless by the bald-faced, blandly spoken truth. She does not laugh, but the gleam in her eye is as good as.

Steve raises his eyebrows and says "that's slander."

The loose knot of hair bobs at the back of Bucky's head, he hardly knows where to look. At Steve, away from Steve, at the ground. He says "there are very few things I know for certain right now, Steven Grant Rogers. But I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you are the most reckless man I ever met. _You dropped your shield in the Potomac._ " And it's like he's only just realized what happened on the helicarrier, suspended in the sky. "I _shot you_ and you _dropped your shield_ like an _idiot_ and appealed to the sanity of a _crazy, brainwashed murderer._ What the fuck, Steve?!"

He at least has the decency to look a little bit embarrassed. "I knew you were still in there, Buck," he mumbles. "I trusted you'd come back."

"You trusted me." Metal fingers clench around the arm rest. He could kill him for being so stupid. He could kiss him. He... "Steve, _I_ don't even trust me."

" _What have I told you about adopting strays, Rogers?_ " The Quinjet comms crackle to life, loud and jittery. " _I tolerate Wilson and Carter, I took on a small country's worth of SHIELD employees when you blew that one out of the sky, and now there's three new life signs on board my jet? I run a superhero circus, not a humane society_."

Steve goes white, then pink, his eyes wide. Under his breath he mutters "goddamnit" and then louder "can't slip anything past you, can I, Tony?"

" _Absolutely not_ ," the disembodied voice agrees. " _I don't know why you would even try._ _Scanners picked you up as soon as you entered US airspace. So – who's on board_?"

"We raided the base," Steve begins slowly, casts an agonized look at Sam and Natasha. "But it had already been compromised, no HYDRA personnel left alive. We found a couple of kids – twins – that were being used as experimental subjects. And..." He swallows.

" _No_." Stark's gasp reverberates in the cabin.

"We found him, Tony," Steve says, thick with emotion. "It's Bucky. We found him."

There's a long moment where the comms go silent, only a whisper of radio static. No one breathes. Bucky starts to shrink into himself, and then Stark says " _okay. Okay – I'm probably going to die an early death from all the stress you're causing me, but okay. What do you need? Is anyone hurt?_ "

Steve tips his head back, offering up a silent prayer of thanks. "We're okay. We'll need to get 'em down to medical at some point, but no one's critical."

" _Good. That's... good_." Stark's voice is distant, listing off a hundred and one orders to JARVIS whose polite cadence rises and falls just beyond hearing. " _All right. Barton – dock the Quinjet directly in the hangar, don't set it down on the landing pad. They stalk us with drones now, I don't want anything getting out until we're ready to deal with this_."

Clint's voice from the cockpit says "can do, Boss Man."

"Tony," Steve says around the lump forming in his throat. "Thank you."

" _You owe me._ "

For a long moment, cruising a thousand feet over the ocean, they are silent. The engines hum through the walls, the sound the wind across the wings as they course-correct.

"It's not safe," Bucky whispers. "If I stay. I'm a wanted criminal – they'll come for me eventually."

"Buck."

"I can't drag you down with me."

Steve shakes his head, firm. "We're not having this argument now. Eat something, see a doctor, get some sleep and _then_ we'll figure things out. Right now, all I want is to make sure you're okay. Everything else will wait."

"What if they try to deport the kids? They can't go back to Sokovia – someone's got to look out for them..." Bucky screws up his face, digs his fingers into the armrests of the flight seat, forces himself to breathe as he counts the rivets in the ceiling panels. "Steve," it strangles in his throat. "Steve?"

A hand, big and warm and callused, curling around the nape of his neck. Fingers stroke the loose hairs there. "I'm here," in his ear, an arm circling his chest. "You're all right. You're safe and because of you Wanda and Pietro are safe too. It's all right."

He closes his eyes, swallows down the scream – the sob – seizing in his chest. "I'm scared," he whispers. "Scared outta what's left of my cracked-up mind."

Then, a third hand on his knee. Firm. Tiny.

Natasha says, low and husky. "You're with us now. All of you. And that means your as safe as you can possibly be." She stares at them with her large, serious eyes. "The Avengers protect our own."

The Quinjet rumbles, banking a slow easy left over Manhattan. From the cockpit, Clint shouts "hey! Send the kids up here – let 'em get their first look at the Big City." They nearly trip over one another, pressing up against the glass panes as the Quinjet transcribes ever-tightening circles, winding down toward the Tower, the unknown.

Bucky gapes wide-eyed at this brand-new New York City that shimmers with the edges of long buried memory. Steve's hand finds his, tangling their fingers.

"Welcome home, Buck."


	5. Chapter 5

Tony meets them in the hangar, trailing an impeccable-looking Pepper Potts in his wake and practically vibrating with manic energy. He takes one look at Bucky, hunched and shy halfway down the ramp and says "sweet Jesus, what nutjob designed _you_?!"

"Oh my God," Pepper squawks – Steve wonders sometimes how she manages to find it in herself anymore to be scandalized by anything the man does. " _Tony!_ ”

“What…” Bucky blinks at him, shoulders drawn up around his ears. “What do you mean?”

Stark, heedless of the fact that he is, in fact, blatantly invading the space of the world's most efficient assassin, contemplates the shifting plates and servos of the arm with a truly avaricious gleam in his eye. "I mean the arm itself is gorgeous considering they must've grafted it onto you in the forties. It's a freaking marvel of engineering. But, God, how much does it _weigh?!_ This thing has got to be doing some serious damage to your body..."

“Forty-eight.”

Tony falters. Blinks. “Excuse me?”

“They attached the arm in forty-eight,” Bucky says, each word slow and measured. “Three years after… after I fell.” The look he gives Steve is one over-bright with anguish, the long buried hurt he’d spent so long forgetting.

Steve hears Pepper’s faint little gasp, sees the quick lightning-strike of revulsion on Tony’s face, tries to quell the sickening thump of his own heart against his ribs.

And then Bucky gives a little shake of his head, as though dislodging something, the lines around his eyes deepening sweetly when he says “look at me, Steve, my mother would be _ashamed_ if she saw me now. _Zikhronah livrakha_.” May her memory be a blessing. He shakes his head. “I’m forgetting my manners.” And he thrusts out his flesh-and-blood hand, still not quite able to look them in the eyes when he says “something tells me you already know who I am.”

Pepper, to her credit, recovers almost instantly. “Pepper Potts,” she says taking his hand in her own, delicate grip. Her pale eyes are soft. “Welcome to Avengers Tower, Sergeant Barnes. It's a pleasure.”

Somehow he doubts it, but at least her smile is genuine.

And then there's Tony. Stark's son. Pumping Bucky’s hand vigorously, his deep brown eyes gleaming. God, he looks _exactly_ like Howard. And there’s a memory there, something niggling in the back of his brain…

"Thanks for this, Tony. Pepper." The look on Steve’s face is like a slap. 1940s, the Howling Commandos – he’d looked at them then with the same fond exasperation that he has in his eyes now. His new team, his friends. “These are the kids,” and one gloved hand sweeps over the twins. They stay in the shadow of the Quinjet, clinging to one another. “Wanda and Pietro Maximoff – it might be best,” he says “if we got them inside. They should be looked at by medical.”

"Of course." Pepper's towering stilettos click precisely against the tarmac. "Come with us, we'll get you all taken care of. The guest suites are already prepared." She glances at Steve. "I didn't want to presume, Captain, but we set up a room for Sergeant Barnes on your floor."

Steve gives her his most perfect USO smile. "Thank you, Pepper. That's perfect."

"We do not wish to be any trouble," Pietro rubs circles into his sister's small white shoulder. "Wanda and I..."

"No trouble," Tony says. "Zero trouble. Do you see any trouble, Pep? No? I didn't think so." He spreads his hands, " _mi casa es su casa_."

They follow him inside.

“You’re probably the third scariest thing here,” Tony pipes up, taking in the black Winter Soldier kevlar. “After Bruce and the Man-Eater over there,” the dark head angles toward Natasha who smirks. 

_Shouldn't stay here. Not safe. Not safe for anyone._

His head jerks. "I don't do that anymore."

"I think that HYDRA cell in Sokovia might disagree with you there, Soldier," Natasha says breezing past.

Bucky winces. "I..."

"They got what was coming to them," Natasha soothes. Her voice is low, firm. A head shorter than Barnes, she nonetheless makes him shrink. "There's no doubt about that. But you were the Winter Soldier for seventy years – that's not something you can just stop doing. Trust me, I know. That training, that history, is always going to be there."

 _But he broke the programming._ He's out, he's done - he _broke_ the programming...

Steve is listening. Watching.

 _I'm sorry_ , Bucky thinks, unable to look at those sad blue eyes. _I'm no good. Not anymore._

"It's like heroin, you're addicted and you can't ever get rid of that addiction. But you can endure the withdrawal, ease the cravings." She's right. "You'll always be addicted to the missions, the killings – it's written in your DNA now – but you can redirect it. Track down HYDRA, help protect innocents." She flashes her sharp white teeth at him. "Methadone for the reformed assassin."

"She would know," Barton mutters as he passes, unhooking a hearing aid from the curve of his ear. "Ask her sometime about her defection. That's a fun story."

Natasha raises one fine-groomed eyebrow. "Fun isn't really the word I'd use, Clint."

He makes his eyes wide, says " _boomerang arrow_ , Nat."

"You two are ridiculous," Steve intervenes. And suddenly he's right there, solid against the curve of Bucky's spine. "You won't have to do that anymore," he promises in Bucky's ear. "Not if you don't want to. Never again." Then, lifting his head again, "Clint – it's your turn to write up the mission report."

He's got the other hearing aid out, smirks at them as he signs _I can't hear you_.

"You can read lips."

 _Your boyfriend, your mission report_. It's remarkable how much attitude the man manages to convey just with gestures.

Bruce is waiting for them in the med bay. He speaks in slow, gentle tones bent together with one of the white coats over some inscrutable chart. "Hey Captain," he smiles, adjusts the wire frames of his glasses. "Glad to see you're all back in one piece. Tony says you... oh." He sees Bucky and the twins, blinks. "Huh."

"Huh?" Steve echoes, eyebrows rising.

"Sorry," Bruce says, flushed. "I just had a flashback to twelve years of public schooling, that photo of the Howling Commandos in all of the history textbooks. Welcome back, Sergeant Barnes."

Bucky looks like he wants to crawl out of his own skin. His grey eyes dart around the sterile white space, taking in everything, settling on nothing. Needle pricks and bloodstains between the tiles – he does not see the state-of-the-art hospital. He's back in the bunkers, waiting to be strapped down, sliced open, flayed apart.

Wanda's look is far too knowing, the beginnings of the same panic in her eyes. And he can’t… he can’t… He needs to be strong for them now, for the twins. For Steve.

"Hey. You're okay." Steve, smoothing calloused palms up his arms. "It's okay."

Bucky chokes, manages a whisper. "It's not... The lights. I just..." Fluorescent white, brutal and incandescent behind his eyes. Surgical lamps overhead, the bright white lights when they kept him in the cage, when he couldn't sleep for how loudly the electricity hummed in the air. "It's so bright." They're too sterile, too unnatural.

"Close your eyes."

It's not an order, they're not in a war zone, on the battlefield, but his eyes snap shut anyway. He is content to follow, to do as he is told, to not have to _think_ for a few blessed moments. Steve’s big hands on his shoulders guide him backward, waltzing him toward the nearest examination table. A gentle press and Bucky sits, grips the edges of the table with everything he has. His flesh-and-blood hand trembles.

Sam’s voice, somewhere on his left. "Fluorescent lights, huh?"

Bucky gulps. "They'd be so bright... blinding... and I could never see. They turned the lights on, and I couldn't see their faces, only shapes. Only the lights and shadows." Anonymous tormentors. HYDRA was supposed to thrive in the shadows, in darkness – and they hid themselves with bright white lights.

"Makes sense." Steve speaks like he's in a dream; mellow, distant. "When I woke up, everyone thought it'd be water that'd trigger me. Cold water, oceans, swimming pools, ice." He presses Bucky backward, settles him on the edge of a bed, soft sheets, firm springs. "But it's not the water that gets me. Of all the damned things, it's the sound of radio static."

Peggy's voice, tinny and still so lovely. Her choked back tears. The cracked hull and the last spurt of noise over the radio and then... Steve swallows down the familiar lurch of panic.

“JARVIS?” Tony’s voice is sharp, bossy.

“Already on it, sir.” A clipped, British accent from nowhere and everywhere. The brightness against his eyelids eases.

"You can open your eyes now, Buck."

He does.

"Better?” Steve is asking. “Just take a minute, it’s okay."

His breathing is less ragged, the vise around his chest easing. He nods. Better. Marginally.

Steve thumbs his chin, beams. "Good." There’s tenderness written in every square millimeter of his skin. “That’s good.”

“Sorry,” Bucky mutters to the shiny tile floor. Scuffs his toe along the surface. “Sorry – I didn’t mean to lose it like that. I’m… I’m okay. I’m not…” _Broken. Damaged. Crazy. Damned._ “I broke the programming,” he reminds himself, clings to that scrap of knowledge. “I’m okay. I’m sorry.”

“Um,” says Clint over Steve’s shoulder. The words come out a little mushy, the consonants not so clean – in his own ears it sounds like speaking underwater, unable to hear himself clearly. “You’re sitting in a room with some of the most PTSD-addled folks on the planet, my sad cyborg friend. Trust me, no one’s judging.”


End file.
